Occasionally a debut collection lands with such a wet, happy thud that you immediately start imagining the rest of the writer’s long career. Somehow, no matter how unhinged everyone gets, they’re still appealing - even in the last story, “Starlite.” It’s a humid, torrid but oddly sexless tale of an almost-affair in a crummy hotel room a few blocks from the office. In a break room, he examines her, lovingly, as best he can. When she cracks, when the gin and beer and cupcakes don’t fill the holes up enough, she shows up at the hospital.
“I should love my body more,” she thinks. She asks him if there were any “hot cadavers, any beautiful bodies who donated themselves to science.” He assures her no. The first, “Guts,” is a gripping and stomach-turning portrait of a woman dating a medical student who “has a voice that sounds like everything will be okay.” But her relationship to bodies gets complicated. The two best stories might be the bookends. The ideal setting, she assures her smitten one, is “inside a tent full of stuffed animals, on a raft at sea. In one rollicking story, “Glow Hunter” about two teens who love each other but can’t, the braver girl, Bo, suggests they find some magic mushrooms. They encounter this weird world and their solutions aren’t always good, involving as they do alcohol and eating and riding the bus in circles. Behold her describe the tip of a makeup brush as being a “tiny doe-foot wand.” After work, the telemarketers finish Bud Lights, “mangling a bassinet of happy hour mozzarella sticks.” Parsons is also a wiz at structure - tastemaker Gordon Lish is thanked in the back pages - with stories that go long and deep, narratives braided, balanced by a few pieces that are only a few paragraphs of tightly coiled howl. Add the full-throated roar of weird Karen Russell, plus the deft sparkle of Denis Johnson and all of the gesturing and spooky direction of Carmen Maria Machado. Imagine the punk rock stylings of the criminally underappreciated Jeff Parker. Parsons’ is an exhilarating, enchanting, charming and irresistible new voice.
(“If it’s pissed off and lives in a boot,” one narrator boasts, “we’ve got it.”) Bugs slink through the cracks in thin-walled houses on the edges of expressways. Their jobs are terrible, with awful bosses and worse lobbies in over-chilled buildings, with seashells under glass and throw pillows the color of vomit. There is poverty and violence and harsh weather. They drink and hunt and have not just one secret bag of cocaine, but another. Our teams are pink and peeling, kids willing to do whatever it is we say.” “hoeless and soaked through, blistered and noisy, playing duck-duck-brick while some window mother - not ours - yells for us not to get concussed. “We are sprinkler kids,” Kimberly King Parsons writes in one of 12 fantastic stories in her new collection of enchanting yowls from a big and wild Texas.
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